Polygon's Reviews
As packaged content, this adaptation of Jaws of the Lion is a surprisingly effective remodel of the cardboard product. Despite abandoning the material’s original purpose of providing a more streamlined introduction to Gloomhaven’s systems, the design team produced an entertaining and effective side campaign that will extend the life of Gloomhaven and bring fresh perspectives to this storied game.
It’s worth returning to that earlier word — “fun.” While much of the design seems rooted in the past, if there’s one feeling that endures after a session of Sniper Elite 5, it’s that Rebellion hopefully has a solid blueprint to do something truly innovative and worthwhile with Sniper Elite 6. Until then, raucously silly fun will have to suffice.
There are also five other challenges, all centered around flying very low and very fast, and one challenge that requires players to land on an aircraft carrier. The expansion also introduces a new hypersonic aircraft that can reach Mach 10 and altitudes higher than 150,000 feet. To go along with that, there’s also a new mission to take your flights into the stratosphere.
I’ve even got my own clandestine spaceship that I’m slowly repairing. It’s an option for escape, but it’s also somewhat hollow. Once the ship is repaired, I’ll be “free” to start my own spaceship salvaging company — it’ll be the same dangerous work, but at least I’ll be my own boss.
In conclusion, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is a game that can, and should, be played.
My relationship to Swansong has become almost like my ritual appointment with Passions — until I fully exhaust the entire story, I need my dose of ridiculous people making ridiculous decisions, and the nuclear fallout of their mistakes.
Rogue Legacy 2’s extremely random nature would crush a lesser game, but Cellar Door Games uses that pressure to create diamonds. Even if it’s occasionally frustrating, Rogue Legacy 2 refuses to ever let me be bored, and that’s more than enough to set it apart from the heap of roguelites that have followed in the original game’s wake. I’m 30 hours into Rogue Legacy 2, and I’m still discovering new toys to play with. But I still haven’t found another spoon.
While there’s enough tactical depth and customization to sustain a playthrough, much of Daemonhunters’ battles feel like vehicles for getting across its great story, and not the other way around. For many, XCOM is as much about the long journey — failures and do-overs included — as it is the destination. And while I don’t think Daemonhunters offers that same kind of obsessive replayability, it does lay a crunchy, thrilling tactical base for its brazen aesthetic and brilliant story to tread upon.
When I finally decide to end the game, I leave my Sleeper in the Greenway, where I imagine they can keep on going about their quiet, private routines. I’m not sure I’ll come back to the Eye again, because even if I make different decisions on another run, Citizen Sleeper’s most potent power lies in that first playthrough, when you arrive with nothing, and know even less. This isn’t so much about “replay value” as it is about the singular experience of a journey that — in keeping with the fiction of being a ragged Sleeper trying to survive — is very much a one-way street. Did I do right by my Sleeper? I don’t know. But all things must come to an end, and I feel like they would understand.
This is all welcome, and it makes Dorfromantik a more complete and rewarding experience. But really, this is one of those games for which early-access status was a bit of a misnomer, not because it had no room to improve or features to add, but because its premise was so fully, perfectly realized from the start. Add too much to it, or do anything that might disturb its delicate balance between friction and flow, between logic and naturalism, and it would have been ruined. But the Toukana team knows better than that. They are at peace, strolling through the countryside of the mind.
I do hope younger folks give this game a shot. I think they might once the game’s online mode is available, a place where people under the age of 35 are far more likely to play games. Until I can try those features, though, I’m happy to think of this as Nintendo’s love letter to the old and the old at heart. The company took over a decade to make the game, but maybe they were waiting for folks like me to age into it.
Overall, I’m excited to see how The Iron Oath develops; Curious Panda Games has already laid out a road map throughout 2022 leading to an eventual full release that includes a new class, more points of interest, and more quests. For now, I’m having a lot of fun with the current build — my mercenaries, on the other hand, probably have some complaints with my management style.
Norco ends on a visceral note that will speak to Louisiana’s staunch hangers-on, but also to anyone seeking a beautiful, oppressive, and ultimately hopeful story. The past and future compound, and my reaction was unbridled. As I heaved and sobbed over my computer screen, I thought once again about faith — the kind it takes to stay here. If you don’t understand that faith, Norco may very well convince you.
There’s plenty more for me to tell you about this game, like how it stacks twists atop each other like a tower of turtles, without ever collapsing under all that narrative weight. Though reading more would spoil the fun – and trust me, you’ll be doing plenty of reading once you boot the game up anyway. I’ve written so much about why this game means the world to me. Now I leave y’all to decide whether or not to play it.
But it is impossible for me to play the game after this patch and not think about how so many other games, with so many more interesting ideas and takes on the genre, are not going to get the second swing that Cyberpunk 2077 is going to get over the next year. Years of dev time to produce a standard and familiar 1980s dystopia in a pretty good frame. Just another day in Night City.
Like the sport it portrays, MLB The Show 22 will take a very long season to show me its real virtues. But the short-term successes I’ve already had make it enticing to see that season through to the end. I am sure that repeated commentary, rote animations, and inexplicable simulation results will nag at me come September. I’m also sure that I will still be playing this game in October.
With Weird West, these magic moments appear far too infrequently. Sheer ambition means eventually something special is bound to be spat out by the game’s extensive simulations — a mishap with an oil lamp, for example — although it’ll be a rough and unwieldy thing, all the more crude when compared with the extensive elegance of a Dishonored. Instead of doing what many, myself included, had hoped — converting the spirit of Arkane and the immersive sim into an inventive top-down form — Weird West has stumbled into a more mundane existence as a pared-down computer RPG that’s nowhere near weird enough.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land burns too brightly, too soon, and that initial joy was hard to recall by the time the credits rolled.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands breathes weird, new life into the stale franchise
Ghostwire: Tokyo’s charm can’t make up for its frustrations